A Rose for Witch Emily
by mk704
Summary: Based off of "A Rose for Miss Emily" also by Faulkner, this fic extension puts a spin on the final section of the short story by making Miss Emily slightly more supernatural and utterly creepy than before.
**V.**

The first thing we all noticed inside the house was how _dark_ it was, the lace curtains that were visible from the outside supplemented by darker, blackout panels behind them. There was a gloom about the house that could not have only just settled after her death, but must have clung to the dusty rooms for years. The scent that had haunted the town decades before was rank inside, mixed with an eerie combination of dried flowers and dried sage and burned dust.

The women scowled at the jars that were cluttered around the room, a glass-fronted cabinet that must have once held heirloom china filled with drying herbs and dusted little boxes. "Witchcraft," they murmured, shaking their heads, and the men just chuckled nervously in response.

We had planned to head upstairs, go to the room that we knew needed to be forced open, but it was too tempting to look around a little more. The furniture, always immaculately placed when we had come to the house as children for painting lessons, seemed to be pushed around haphazardly, the rugs also bunched up at the edges. When Judge Stevens nudged up one corner with his shoe, his wife scolded him with a soft shove to his arm. "It's painted-" he murmured, and she shot him a look as we all looked over and wanted to pull up the rug altogether. But the furniture held it down, probably by design. We wondered if the man servant had moved it back after her death. We wondered how much he knew.

No matter how long we lingered downstairs, the upstairs needed to be tackled. As we ascended the stairs, the smells only grew stronger, the decay covered with sage and sickly-sweet floral scents. But the cracked door at the top of the stairs halted our progress, a soft tinkling noise like a baby's mobile floating from it.

We gently pushed the door open and took a collective gasp. It was the stuff of children's stories, told after school in hushed voices and smug smiles. "Witchcraft," the women repeated, and this time no one bothered to shush them, as we were all too busy stepping forward, or backing away. The shelves were similar to the cabinet downstairs, just instead of being constrained to a single spot they lined the whole room. Dusty jars with more dried greenery sat next to jars with dark contents we had no name for. We'd point to one thing or another and we'd all turn to it. The shelf full of nothing but crystals, arranged in an order we could not fathom; the cut crystals that hung just inside the window, the breeze pushing them against eachother to create the sound that had pulled us inside. The desk- altar?- by the window with candles lined along the edges, melted down to the wick; a book laid next to the candles, closed with a darkened leather cover.

"This isn't what we came for," someone murmured and we nodded, still mesmerized for a few more moments before we stepped out of the room and shut the door firmly behind us. As we stepped away from the closed door, we could tell that the scent that covered the decay had been from that room.

This door did not come unstuck nearly so easily. Three men had to ram against it, and when it opened we couldn't even gasp the way we had at the first opened door.

It may as well have been a tomb in the room. It would have been better if it had been. The room looked like what the whole house should have- with perfectly lined up bed and side tables, a dressing table with a man's things arranged as if he had just come home for the night.

The man laid upon the bed, his head turning at the sound of them forcing themselves in.

"Is Miss Emily returning?" It asked. Homer asked. We couldn't even comprehend what it- or he- was, and no one could muster a response. "I've missed her."

Its voice was soft and quiet, and he moved slowly, sitting up like a man recovering from a long-suffering illness. Death would do that to a person. He was in those pajamas that she had bought decades ago, his hair just the same as we'd seen him in, all that time ago when he'd made his last journey through her front door. His eyes were sunken though, his skin all pale and grey, and when he sat up, almost half of us rushed out of the hallway, down the stairs, and out.

"Miss Emily said she wouldn't leave me," he said, his voice a little louder and more confused. We could hear the way his breath crackled through him, like he was dusty just as the rest of the house was, and with every word the acrid scent only became worse.

His gaze strayed to the pillow and our eyes all followed. The open side of the large bed was not nearly so dusty as the rest of the room, a single silver hair still on the indented pillow.

We still couldn't even open our mouths, and we settled for backing out of the room all together, closing the door sharply behind us. The few women who remained were easily shooed away, and the men quickly made a circle in the hallway, two hands on the door handle to keep it closed.

"It would be a mercy." The consensus came quickly, and Thompson patted the gun at his side. "A mercy," we echoed, and nodded. Thompson walked in alone, two men at the door, and the rest at the hallway. We never said who shot him later. Or it. We never settled on that either.

Not a single person in the town- or any in all of Yoknapatawpha county- didn't know the story within a fortnight. We couldn't figure out what to say about it, to call it just what they had deserved, or say that was just what happened when ladies like that didn't find the right man. We couldn't escape the quiet questions, the sidelong glances when we went to any other town, nbut we could simply shrug and say that it wasn't our place to judge. We all had out own theories, of course, but none that needed repeated to someone who wasn't one of us.

The children were the ones to figure out what to say, their hands tapping along to the beat as they sang about the Witch Miss. We shushed them, of course, but that only made the song spread faster, the words quieter.

The women hummed the tune to themselves every day as they did their family's laundry, their own homes thoroughly dust free, just a little smug about their own place in the community.


End file.
